There have been a spate of articles, including a report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2025, predicting that the U.S.‘s reign as a global superpower will be over by 2025 or sooner. The reasons are the usual suspects, succinctly summarized by Alfred McCoy in an article in Salon: “Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.” The trade deficit drives the first threat, along with the movement of production overseas. The poorly ranked U.S. educational system is not turning out the scientists and mathematicians necessary to continue our role in technological innovation. McCoy says: “The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010.” The third threat is due to the lack of confidence in the U.S. economy, not just because of the recent banking crisis, but also because of the huge national debt which exploded during the Bush/Cheney regime. A large portion of that debt is held by China, which along with India, Russia and Brazil are overtaking or surpassing the U.S. in key economic areas. In addition, McCoy points out that the U.S.‘s declining economy has already decreased the country's ability to control global oil supplies, which will exacerbate the coming energy crisis.
With these predictions in mind, I turned to this 1988 account of Theroux’s travels in China. A reliably excellent writer, Theroux describes the places he goes, the trains he uses to get there, and the people he meets in brief anecdotes, so that reading the book is like listening to a most entertaining dinner guest. He does not hide his own bad behavior, such as asking politically sensitive questions of people who do not want to answer; refusing to use anything but the old versions of city names such as Peking, Canton, Shanghai; and giving out forbidden portraits of the Dalai Lama in Tibet.
Theroux does not paint an attractive picture of Chinese life. Heating and lighting are luxuries. In Manchuria they don’t wash because they don’t have hot water or bathrooms, and the houses are kept so cold that they wear coats and hats even inside. Toilets in the trains are holes in the floor. People spit all the time and everywhere, inside and out, leaning forward to dribble it onto the floor or ground and then wiping at it with their feet. The Chinese have much catching up to do with the modern world: the trains, even the new ones, are steam locomotives.
Of course the book is outdated, but the poverty of the people is shocking nonetheless. There are just too many of them, and they use every inch of space for living or growing food. Forests and wild animals are wiped out, songbirds shot for their scrap of meat, and mountains made into terraced gardens and caves into homes. Of Gansu, Theroux says, “. . . everything visible in this landscape was man-made.” Outside Shanghai, they use human excrement as fertilizer. “It was all used. Farm yields were high, but the place epitomized drudgery. Everyone’s energy was expended on simply existing there, and every inch of land had been put to use. Why grow flowers when you can grow spinach? Why plant a tree when you can use the sunshine on your crop?” People live in caves and those too poor to own oxen pull the plows themselves. Theroux observes that “If there were enough of you, it was really very easy to dig up a continent and plant cabbages.”
Much of his conversation with people centers around trying to measure the extent of the then-new capitalism and the attitudes toward the recent past. He finds everyone intent of making money and trying to repair the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. They are starting businesses, rebuilding monasteries to attract tourists, converting communes into more profitable cooperatives. He finds few with a good word to say for their previously revered leader, and when he visits Mao’s birthplace, it is deserted and the gift shop no longer carries Mao’s picture, his badge, or his little red book. Still, people are surprisingly forgiving, or perhaps they deliberately set aside the abuses and cruelty of that time. Theroux asks one man if he is bitter. The man replies, “‘No . . . They were young. They didn’t know anything.'”
Although the government repression we hear so much about is omnipresent—people don’t believe the government radio broadcasts and refuse to speculate about possible political changes over which they have no control—Theroux again and again finds an optimistic spirit: children playing in the snow, ice sculptures in Harbin with fluorescent tubes frozen inside, a manager bragging about the productivity of his cooperative and plans for future expansion. For the Chinese, every train journey is a big pajama party, though it means leaving the car trashed after even the shortest journey.
McCoy’s article scared me, not because I hadn’t already pieced together those same threats that will reduce the U.S. to a second-class country, but because I hadn’t thought about how quickly it can occur or what might happen afterwards. When the British empire faded, it was replaced by the U.S. empire: a soft landing indeed due to the similarity between the two cultures. We will not be so lucky. How much of Theroux’s picture of Chinese life is our future? It is not a comfortable thought.